The Obama Valley Dinner: POTUS Got the Seating Chart Wrong

This one has bugged me for some time, but I've not had the time to write it. Now that I'm on a plane for the next four hours, and it has Wifi, I can finally get around to bitching out loud about the photo below:

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Now this photo was widely discussed when it was released by the White House, a few weeks ago. Folks speculated on who the people were that we couldn't see (the woman with her back to us? The guy next to Zuckerberg?!), and while I may know who those folks are, that's not my point.

Although my point *is* about the seating chart.

Because if you don't think a team of protocol and political experts didn't plan out who sat where in relation to POTUS, well, you're just not very familiar with how Washington DC does dinner parties. Who sits where, and why, is more than discussed. It's debated, it's determined, and it sends a clear message to all concerned. And when a photo like this is released by the White House, it declares to the public a definitive and particular pecking order.

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So, with that in mind, is it any surprise that the two leaders who received the privilege of sitting next to President Obama were Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg?

After all, they do rank very high in the Valley - probably in the top three, if not top two, though Eric Schmidt might take issue with that (and Lord knows Larry Ellison will too, but come on).

But what matters here is not who the Valley thinks are the most important folks in the realm. What matters is what Washington, and in particular the White House, believes, and in particular what message, if any, it wants to send through a photo like this.

And I am, quite frankly, disappointed with the seating chart.

Why? Well, because this administration is supposedly all about openness. It's got the Open Government Initiative, after all, with a conference focusing on samesaid this very week. At the top of its Valley policy agenda is privacy, again with a focus on transparency. Not to mention how the adminsitration has stood up time and again for the open Internet in foreign policy matters.

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So why are the CEOs of the two companies with the most closed and controlling data ecosystems - Facebook and Apple - sitting right next to the President?

I'd argue the White House missed an opportunity to send a subtle message - one favoring open platforms, open data exchange, and transparency about data use. Had those been factored into the seating chart, I'd wager that Schmidt and Costolo would have been sitting next to Obama, and Zuckerberg and Jobs would have languished a bit nearer toward the ends of the table. Sure, neither Twitter nor Google are innocent when it comes to how they disclose use of data, but both are clear champions of openness in computing ecosystems, as well as active agents of change in foreign policy issues. I mean, check out this tweet from Dick, and this post from Google, just for starters. And that's just China....